Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd reviewed the Strauss-Kahn/Sofitel Hotel/Rape case in the New York Times yesterday. She characterized Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a politically powerful white male who preyed on women. Based on comments this week by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, she characterized the victim in the case as a habitual liar.

Key Questions: Do we see Strauss-Kahn as taken down by a “nogoodnick with a druggie boyfriend” OR do we see an immigrant woman traumatized and thrown to the wolves by the justice system?

Conclusion: “When a habitual predator faces off against a habitual liar, the liar will most likely lose, even if it is the rare case when she is telling the truth.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Paul Krugman in his NY Times column yesterday, reviewed the current debate/stalemate on lifting the debt limit in Washington that has permeated the news media in recent weeks. Dr. Krugman established that if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. As a result, at best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis. In the past, raising the debt limit was a routine congressional action and never debated. It was raised seven times during George W. Bush’s administration without any fanfare.

Dr. Krugman expanded on the repercussions as follows:

“Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece.”

Dr. Krugman comments that President Obama was almost naïve in not securing the raising of the debt limit as part of the budget agreement reached last December when the Bush tax cuts were extended. However, he reserved his most important comments for the Republicans who he believes feel that President Obama will “cave in to their demands for budget cuts and no tax increases”. Furthermore, he states that “ it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly” to bolster their elections chances next year.

His conclusion: “It’s time — indeed, long past time — for President Obama to seize the issue and to prove them [the Republicans] wrong.

Yes, Mr. President!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks takes on Diane Ravitch is his column today in the New York Times. Both are at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week and Brooks is responding to two speeches Ravitch made on school reform. The Aspen Ideas Festival is the annual gathering of the Aspen Institute where leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines “engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues of our times”. Ravitch at one time was one of the leading intellects behind the education reform movement — emphasizing charter schools, testing and accountability. Over the past few years, she has become that movement’s most vehement critic. Brooks describes Ravitch as adopting:

“the party-line view of the most change-averse elements of the teachers’ unions: There is no education crisis. Poverty is the real issue, not bad schools. We don’t need fundamental reform; we mainly need to give teachers more money and job security”.

and

“she is right that teaching is a humane art built upon loving relationships between teachers and students. If you orient the system exclusively around a series of multiple choice accountability assessments, you distort it”.

Brooks goes on to cite examples of excellent charter schools that go beyond teaching to the test and blames school leaders who give in to the pressures to fixate testing results. He concludes:

“The fact is that many [public] schools have become spiritually enervated and even great teachers struggle in an inert culture. It’s the reformers who often bring the passion, using tests as a lever.

If your school teaches to the test, it’s not the test’s fault. It’s the leaders of your school.”

I agree with Brooks to some extent. Leadership is one of the key elements for schools to be successful especially at the school level (principals and assistant principals). However, in the past decade of school reform we have had school chancellors and superintendents particularly in our large urban school systems such as New York and Washington that have been the major proponents of teaching to the test and have been crushing weights on the entire system and especially the principals to do the same. These same chancellors have taken an impassioned adversarial position with the teachers unions creating near toxic environments for any fruitful reform to take place.

Tony